The Advanced Composition class was awesome. We read essays from writers like Adrienne Rich and Annie Dillard and discussed the literary conventions they used to express ideas in essay form, and of course we wrote several essays on topics drawn from our readings and on comparing several essay writers’ particular conventions. It was one of my favorite classes from the entire 4 years of college. And the professor was a stereotypical English Prof, down to the herringbone and brown suede jackets with patches on the elbows, and the pretentious but not condescending conversational teaching manner. I remember it was a fairly small class, not many takers for Advanced Comp it seems: once the general ed classes, Comp I and II have been successfully survived, most people fade away from the study of essay writing, so the professor would pull up a desk and we would gather in a circle to talk about the essays we had read for class and/or the ones we had written. I loved that class.
The Intro to literary studies class was very good as well. We read some Chaucer, mostly because the professor who had to teach this lower level major specific class that particular semester was a huge Chaucer nut, and we also had a text that taught us how to critically read literature and then pick it apart in an arrogant attempt to decipher a meaning from a part of the text. As I progressed through this class, I was struck by the historical context that we just barely touched on in our study of the texts. Each text it seemed to me, and I know this is not a unique observation, was written within a specific historical context, but within the parameters of this class, we were unable to do anything but hit the basics. So that semester I resolved to take some history classes the following semester in an attempt to add more depth to my understanding of the lexicon of literature texts that we were going to study in class after class for the course of my undergraduate career. And from my previous slight perusals of the graduate catalogue, it seemed the same texts would extend into semester long if not career long foundational works.
The class I took on English poets covered people like Yeats, Byron, Shelley, Donne, Eliot, Wordsworth and Keats. It was in this class that I had my first “real” introduction to literary criticism. For some reason, the papers we were writing in the Intro class didn’t seem as foreboding as tackling a couple of English poets. And neither did the study and mimesis of the essayists. I was having some trouble picking apart the text. I selected a Keats poem, if I remember right, I am sure I buried the details of this memory so deep that long-term psychoanalysis would not even be sufficient to unbury it. And since I have lost all of the writing from my college days, details will remain sketchy. But the important part of the story is not which specific text I selected for my first critical analysis, but the result of my engagement with that particular form of textual interaction.
I was mortified, to put it mildly. I kept reading, and rereading the selected text, searching for meaning I could pull out of it and write about in the pretentious and arrogant form aptly or grudgingly called literary criticism. I think I couldn’t get past one of the homonymic meanings of criticism and critical – to judge in a harsh manner, as in criticize. Who am I, after all to criticize the writing of John Keats or any other great writer? Who am I to take their text and impose my own judgments and analysis of the meaning the author intended? As a writer I found it appalling and horrifying that one day I could get to the point where I was dead and people would be “critically analyzing” my work and imposing their ideas on my choices of word, structure and thinking. Now dialogue about my topics is a different animal altogether. But, and maybe I could have found a way to push through if I looked at it like a dialogue, this just felt to me like a betrayal of their art and their intention.
So about half-way through the semester, I made an appointment with the professor of the English Poet class, who also happened to be the Chair of the English dept, where my major resided. And I know that calling her position Chair is not proper English, but I hate the whole Chairman, Chairperson, Chairwoman choice, so plain old Chair, which is gender neutral, it is. At my appointment, we made some small talk about how my first semester was going and how I was enjoying my classes and becoming involved as an older student with school-age children, and then we jumped right in to why I was there: My dismay with ripping John Keats’ poetry apart for a literary criticism paper in her class. And during the course of this conversation, she made a comment that stuck with me and altered the course of my undergraduate education. She said that if I didn’t like doing literary criticism and writing this type of paper, then I might want to reevaluate my decision to major in English Lit, because at the undergraduate level and especially at the graduate level, that is what I would be doing more than anything else.
And, of course, she was correct. It is absolutely impossible to be an English Literature major and avoid literary criticism. And doing literary criticism kills the enjoyment, the poesy, the brilliance of reading a work of literature purely on its own merits. I don’t impose my interpretation on the text, not in a formal way, and can just experience the sequence of words and the beauty of form. And then I can write my own words and create my own forms and express my own ideas on their own merit, not as they relate to tearing apart and judging and criticizing the work of another writer, whose work should also stand on its own merit and be experienced in pure form.
I went on to take a lot of history classes and learned about the historical context that my favorite works of literature were written and originally read within. I also took cultural and gender studies classes and deeply enjoyed almost all of my general ed classes. But it was my first Anthropology and Sociology classes that made me fall in love and finally choose a major beyond English lit. Putting literature within a social and cultural as well as historical context added dimensions I couldn’t even dream of when I started back to college as an English major. And I truly believe that my critical study of the world around me which results in the topics I choose to write about is more deeply informed by this contextual humanities study than it would have been if I would have continued to study literature and pick it apart and impose my interpretations on it.
I would like to return to college some day, but the debt I amassed from my undergraduate education coupled with the cost of living divided by prospects for jobs with a dream to write and a well-rounded liberal arts/humanities degree make that idea far into the future. For now, I will continue my broad education on my own, and my enjoyment of literature and poetry, and will write my own works that I hope will be enjoyed by people in all times and places.
Bridgete Isabela 28, December 2011
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